Holloway Editione1.0.0
Updated August 14, 2024Youβre reading an excerpt of Great Founders Write, by Ben Putano, writer, entrepreneur, and book publisher. Heβs the founder of Damn Gravity Media, a publishing house that inspires and educates tomorrowβs great founders. Purchase now for lifetime access to the book and on-demand video course.
Copywriting is sales at scale.
One great piece of writing can do the job of a thousand salespeople. Strong copywriting will improve every aspect of your business, from your website to sales emails to paid ads and job descriptions. Itβs one of the most powerful skills you can learn as a founder.
But copywriting is especially hard for startups because no one knows who you are. Big companies have established customer bases who know, like, and trust them. They offer proven solutions to known problems. Startups often start at square one: convincing potential customers they have a problem worth solving. Even if the problem is well known, you have to convince customers to ditch their current solution and take a chance on you. Either way, itβs an uphill battle
As a general rule, people hate change. So how do you convince someone your product or service is worth the effort to switch? How do you build trust, sell your solution, and generate demand in just eight secondsβthe average attention span of someone on the internet?
Master copywriters donβt start every new project from scratch. They use proven copywriting frameworks to press all the right psychological buttons, every time. But most frameworks, like PASβPain, Agitate, Solutionβwere created for big companies. They work wonderfully when you have a well-known brand. Startups need their own copywriting framework.
Itβs time to learn your ABC123s.
The best copywriting combines sales and storytelling.
This is especially true for startups. You need to convince customers the world is changing around them, then present a new path to a more beautiful future. Along the way, you must build enough trust and urgency to trigger the action you want them to take.
While running WeContent, my content marketing agency for startups, I struggled to fit our clientsβ narratives into traditional copywriting frameworks. So my team and I set out to create something new: a copywriting framework that positioned startups as the obvious solution to an urgent problem in their customersβ lives.